no2self.net

A worthy addition to your RSS list: 765.blogspot.com

Carefully crafted thoughts formalized by the act of writing for an audience. Exactly the justification for blogging that I was explaining to my students last week.

A quote from the latest entry:

The forms of the Industriosphere have not pulled themselves into being, they have been put together by human beings through trial and error. They are not innocent, and it serves us to be as skeptical of their claims to functional autonomy as we are about claims to formal autonomy that set the terms of the discipline’s other discourses*.

Bonus: by crikey, the guy can really draw too

(*Rod: that last link is for you re. our recent e-mailing!)

Two recent comments worth bringing to the front page:

First, a couple of links to recent artforum.com articles.

Hello,

I’m writing to point out to you two articles from the February issue of Artforum now online. One offers Yale art historian Sean Keller’s take on the renovations of Mies’s Crown Hall at IIT and Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery. The other is artist Josiah McElheny’s musings on architect Josef Hoffmann’s interiors, timed to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie.

I would be flattered if you’d consider linking to either article (or both).

The February Artforum Table of Contents: artforum.com/inprint/issue=200702
Keller’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12384
McElheny’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12385

All three links are to their permanently-accessible URLs. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Best wishes,
Brian

Next, more news on the Human League album cover graphics from Jack at submitresponse.com.

Ah, that’s why they’re familiar! I’d have to dig through a ton of boxes to check, but I seem to remember Pritt Stick-ing a photocopy of that particular dancing couple onto the cover of the master copy of a fanzine about 12 years ago.

It’s a single, rather than an album, though, and there’s two versions of the sleeve – the original 1978 issue on Fast has more architectural illustrations on the back, along with lyrics, the 1982 Virgin/EMI just has the songs listed on the back. (I know this because I really want a first pressing 1978 copy, the one in mono with black and white labels, but only have a French 1982 reissue, ‘produit et realisé par The Human League’. Sad, eh?)

Back and forth: Owen responds with added detail about some of the recent Letraset people appearances, pointing out that a couple of them once made an appearance on The Human League’s album cover: Being Boiled – Circus of Death.

Where next? Does anybody know the source of the other graphic on the album?

And there I was thinking I ruled the roost when it came to sharing architectural images of days gone by. A link by thingsmagazine.net to nastybrutalistandshort caught my eye for another reason when I spotted a Gorden Cullen sketch taken from a book that currently resides on my bedside table*: Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Ministry of Housing, 1961)

Which proved to be only the beginning of a collection of wonderful images from this period posted on Owen Hatherley’s site The Measures Taken. Other examples include the work of Cedric Price, Alison and Peter Smithson and the GLC.

His opening paragraph also provides a perfect connection with my recent entries about architectural figures (my emphasis).

An intriguing by-product of the 1960s’ architectural fetish for the ex nihilo was its proliferation of deeply peculiar drawings. A budding Piranesi or Chernikhov would have all manner of opportunity to sketch out their own particular vision of a collective future, and in so doing created something as jarring in its schematic, rectilinear design as Library Music LPs or Penguin Book covers, only less lauded, perhaps because of the realities that the plans would degenerate into. They would be mocked by writers like Jonathan Raban by the 70s as depictions ‘strangely tapering humanoids’ who couldn’t mess up the immaculate architecture and the geometric certainties of the town plans. Actually the images from this time veer from genuinely rather terrifying images of technocracy that evoke something to break the will of Number Six in The Prisoner, to really quite cute scribbles of happy proletarian families in their open-plan Parker Morris apartments.

Image and quote from The Measures Taken

(* intimate location details provided for texture only – relationship to bed irrelevant – I love architecture, but not that much)

Friday’s tutorials with my post-graduate students from BSA introduced me to a new, influential figure in contemporary architecture. I met him some time ago, but until now hadn’t considered his importance.

Say hello to 2D_Man_Backpack:

He’s one of the default figures in the industry changing software, Google Sketchup. I’ve used him myself in models before, but it wasn’t until I started to see him appear in student’s work – in multiple locations across a model – that I realised what his key attribute was.

He’s entirely passive. Culturally, politically, ideologically, you name it, he hasn’t got a thing to say. He doesn’t have a single opinion about the spaces you force him to inhabit.

Is that a shirt or a roll-neck? Are those jeans or Farrar trousers? Hush Puppies or Merrells? Is he just passing by or will he stop and say/do something? Is the bag full of business or pleasure?

What’s he looking at and what does he look like? I can’t tell you because he’s programmed to always present this 2D surface to the camera. He doesn’t have the balls to look you in the eye. His glances bounce off your building without leaving an impression and with the seemingly unstoppable rise of Sketchup I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of him.

The lack of people inhabiting spaces is a long standing criticism of architectural photography. Photographers will tell you it’s about long shutter speeds and the subsequent time-lapse blur, but let’s not deny the fact that many of us like to picture our creations before they get sullied by the one thing we can’t control. My building would be perfect, if only it wasn’t spoilt by the people using it.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. His ambivalence reminds me of the qualities I listed in the entry about the blackbeltjones sketch comparing figure drawing techniques: Architects vs. Interaction Designers. Keep your hands in your pockets.

Whilst the Letraset guys I uploaded during the Architectural Advent may not be politically correct in the 21st Century, one thing’s for certain, they’ve got an opinion and by gosh old chap, they’re going to tell you.

The most worrying realisation about this entry? From the back, 2D Man looks just like me.